Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Rina Vivekanandan: My work over the past 30 years has stretched across multiple jurisdictions (United Kingdom, APAC and India) and various sectors (IT, education, hospitality and government services. This has given me the opportunity to work with a diverse and multi-generational workforce, enabling me to gain an insight into the nuances of human behaviour--that propelled some to excel and others to languish in their roles. This knowledge and my passion for teaching stoked the idea to start a business that leverages human skills and emotions -- to build well-rounded professionals. My friends Anna Mathew and Sawitha Harikrishnan, who share my passion for enabling growth in people joined me on this journey and Praaptii was born.
Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by Praaptii?
Rina Vivekanandan: I believe that professionals require a combination of hard and soft skills to build a successful future. Praaptii partners with the Kerala Government departments, educational institutions and corporations to impart soft skills and upskill their workforce and build well-rounded human capital.
Our programmes leverage emerging skills (e.g. innovation, empathy etc.) that focus on self-exploration and competency building for personal and professional goal attainment. For educational institutions, our service offering includes generic modules on Self-Awareness, Managing Emotions, Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Being Agile, Time Management and Gender Sensitisation.
The bouquet of services for corporations include Onboarding, Team Building, Workplace Etiquette, Unbox Your Thinking, Communication, Building an Agile workforce, to name a few.
Our “Campus to Corporate” programmes are very much in demand across India; as a part of these programmes, we equip college students with employability skills for a smooth transition into the work life.
Great Companies: What makes Praaptii different from hundreds of other similar service providers?
Rina Vivekanandan: The future looks exciting with different working models – it could be work from home (WFH), work from anywhere (WFA), or a hybrid model. This requires a resilient and high performing team to work cohesively and deliver sustainable results.
Therefore, it is imperative for organizations to equip their workforce with skills that enable them to relate to one another, and to their customers seamlessly. Emotional intelligence is the stepping stone for the development of these skills at the workplace. Praaptii helps businesses tap into the innate potential of the workforce through customized service offerings which help build and develop self-awareness and emotional intelligence.
Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?
Rina Vivekanandan: Research conducted by the likes of Harvard University, Carnegie Mellon Foundation and Stanford Research Centre state that approximately 85% of job success can be attributed to soft and people skills and 15% on technical capability. Yet, during the hiring process, the focus remains on hard skills as it is measurable unlike soft skills.
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Despite being providers of niche services tailored to resonate with the digital future, a majority of our customers are yet to envision a need for skilling their team / students with soft skills. As a result, they are unwilling to pay for premium upskilling. We are therefore focusing a lot of our efforts towards building awareness among clients about the importance of these skills to the growth of institutions and corporations.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for Praaptii?
Rina Vivekanandan: With the pandemic changing the way business is done, our services are aimed at equipping businesses to meet the challenges of the future. With automation replacing many jobs, the skills that will be in great demand will be those that technology cannot replace. Though machines are taking over repetitive and basic cognitive functions, there are gaps in communication skills, critical thinking, unboxed thinking , ability to handle complexity, problem solving and innovation which will be the most sought after emerging skills. Our solutions aim to fill these gaps.
Praaptii is currently exploring partnership opportunities with corporations in Singapore and the Middle East and we aim to have a presence across the globe in the next three years. We are already generating interest from corporates and institutions in Vietnam, Cambodia and certain African nations for our services.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Rina Vivekanandan: One of my mentors Genny Ghanimeh, founder of Mind Cloud Academy taught me that it is essential for each one of us to find our IKIGAI by aligning what we are great at and love to do, with what the world wants and can pay us for. My philosophy is the same - do research to see if there is a need for what you are good at and whether it can be monetised.
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